High trust society needs cheap energy, and democracy needs a high trust society. To reduce global co2 output significantly, to improve human health outcomes, to aid in reducing populations to sustainable levels (which happens naturally over the long term), to get to a high trust democratic post-scarcity society globally, we have to bridge where we are now by moving as many people as possible from low energy biofuels to natural gas, while we develop and deploy small modular reactors (SMRs) in parallel and work towards fusion, both of which enables generating hydrogen sustainably. That's absolutely key. Our rare earth minerals are finite and we are using huge quantities in the stupidity of electric cars, and solar solutions when we could be lifting people out of poverty, reducing co2 and environmental damage by switching them to natural gas. Just run some of the numbers through AI if you don't believe me. Here's a short example of the impact of low energy fuels on the worlds poor; https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8ccd6709-c342-4fd0-a898-d2df76017431 Natural gas could change that but it's a bridge, we have to go nuclear in parallel.
Do you believe post-scarcity is really viable even in the medium (200yr, ish) term for Humanity?
Talk me through LNG, I've had that filed under 'Fossil' for a while and have concerns about the primary suppliers being.. well, rather unpleasant places?
The bad news first. We are highly unlikely to manage to stay focused enough to get to post-scarcity without running out of key resources first. That means, as a species, we're fucked. However, I think we could manage it if our politicians and world leaders worked together to do it. If you look back at Acid Rain and the Ozone hole, we managed to work together globally to address those issues successfully. My premise is that we know that high trust societies with cheap energy build amazing stores of value and flourish. At least we did, I think a combination of unregulated credit markets and what-ever has gone on in the current version of the liberal mind, and very poor work by conservatives to constrain the greedy people in their midst has got us where we are. Anyway, back to LNG. You use it as a bridging fuel to lift nearly 2bn out of fuel poverty, at the same time you help their societies become capable of supporting and maintaining the infrastructure you use to do it. You can't walk in to a country and say 'you're democratic now' if they have no culture of democracy (we've seen that fail multiple times), and equally you can't walk in and say 'here's a load of money and some cool equipment, good luck'. They will fail. You have to partner with them. To be able to do that the 'west' needs not to have become a hollowed out shell (as is currently happening imho). Why do I say Solar and Wind are a waste of time in the long run? Life cycle and finite resources (let's ignore recycling). The same goes for Electric cars and batteries. We are burning through (in some cases quite literally, https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/11/ship_electric_fire/) huge amounts of limited resource to make things that will be totally useless in 20 years time. Nuclear, especially Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are predicted to have a 60 year life time that doesn't degrade. So you bridge where we are now, dung/wood/charcoal to LNG, getting huge benefits, while we nail down SMR and Fusion technology. SMR first, then fusion. There are some big steps forward in those spaces thanks to computational science allowing us to rapidly prototype complex meta materials that we would have taken decades to create. If we manage to then deploy SMRs globally with limited Solar and less and less LNG, and then bring on-line Fusion we can fully transition to clean hydrogen for transportation stopping the need for petrochemicals in that sector. We will still need them for other industrial and chemical processes. I will be long dead by the time we get there, most likely 80-100 years time if we start work now. Computational power will have exploded by then, robots will be doing all sorts of dangerous tasks for us, and we will have had 80+ years of work on advanced meta materials. That's the point where we will gradually transition to post-scarcity by using nanotechnology capabilities for recycling. Once we get above 95% we will be less and less likely to run out of resources. Fusion will run for millennia using tritium in the sea (potentially) and our transportation fuel's (hydrogen) waste product is water. If it wasn't for AI and computational maths you would likely be adding 100-200 years to the time line. We've got to make it out of this century without killing each other and falling into a dark age we won't get out of. The environment will recover and with nearly infinite energy even Ed's CO2 capture machines could be running for free although I have to say, help those previously energy poor people plant trees and rebuild their countries bio diversity and I bet you will see a rapid recovery globally. That's my belief anyway. Do I want to use LNG, not really, but our energy sequencing is totally wrong and it would take decades to train people to maintain SMR / Fusion systems even after we figure out how to build them cheaply enough to deploy globally (Edited multiple times due to typos and fat fingers).
High trust society needs cheap energy, and democracy needs a high trust society. To reduce global co2 output significantly, to improve human health outcomes, to aid in reducing populations to sustainable levels (which happens naturally over the long term), to get to a high trust democratic post-scarcity society globally, we have to bridge where we are now by moving as many people as possible from low energy biofuels to natural gas, while we develop and deploy small modular reactors (SMRs) in parallel and work towards fusion, both of which enables generating hydrogen sustainably. That's absolutely key. Our rare earth minerals are finite and we are using huge quantities in the stupidity of electric cars, and solar solutions when we could be lifting people out of poverty, reducing co2 and environmental damage by switching them to natural gas. Just run some of the numbers through AI if you don't believe me. Here's a short example of the impact of low energy fuels on the worlds poor; https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8ccd6709-c342-4fd0-a898-d2df76017431 Natural gas could change that but it's a bridge, we have to go nuclear in parallel.
Do you believe post-scarcity is really viable even in the medium (200yr, ish) term for Humanity?
Talk me through LNG, I've had that filed under 'Fossil' for a while and have concerns about the primary suppliers being.. well, rather unpleasant places?
Thanks!
The bad news first. We are highly unlikely to manage to stay focused enough to get to post-scarcity without running out of key resources first. That means, as a species, we're fucked. However, I think we could manage it if our politicians and world leaders worked together to do it. If you look back at Acid Rain and the Ozone hole, we managed to work together globally to address those issues successfully. My premise is that we know that high trust societies with cheap energy build amazing stores of value and flourish. At least we did, I think a combination of unregulated credit markets and what-ever has gone on in the current version of the liberal mind, and very poor work by conservatives to constrain the greedy people in their midst has got us where we are. Anyway, back to LNG. You use it as a bridging fuel to lift nearly 2bn out of fuel poverty, at the same time you help their societies become capable of supporting and maintaining the infrastructure you use to do it. You can't walk in to a country and say 'you're democratic now' if they have no culture of democracy (we've seen that fail multiple times), and equally you can't walk in and say 'here's a load of money and some cool equipment, good luck'. They will fail. You have to partner with them. To be able to do that the 'west' needs not to have become a hollowed out shell (as is currently happening imho). Why do I say Solar and Wind are a waste of time in the long run? Life cycle and finite resources (let's ignore recycling). The same goes for Electric cars and batteries. We are burning through (in some cases quite literally, https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/11/ship_electric_fire/) huge amounts of limited resource to make things that will be totally useless in 20 years time. Nuclear, especially Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are predicted to have a 60 year life time that doesn't degrade. So you bridge where we are now, dung/wood/charcoal to LNG, getting huge benefits, while we nail down SMR and Fusion technology. SMR first, then fusion. There are some big steps forward in those spaces thanks to computational science allowing us to rapidly prototype complex meta materials that we would have taken decades to create. If we manage to then deploy SMRs globally with limited Solar and less and less LNG, and then bring on-line Fusion we can fully transition to clean hydrogen for transportation stopping the need for petrochemicals in that sector. We will still need them for other industrial and chemical processes. I will be long dead by the time we get there, most likely 80-100 years time if we start work now. Computational power will have exploded by then, robots will be doing all sorts of dangerous tasks for us, and we will have had 80+ years of work on advanced meta materials. That's the point where we will gradually transition to post-scarcity by using nanotechnology capabilities for recycling. Once we get above 95% we will be less and less likely to run out of resources. Fusion will run for millennia using tritium in the sea (potentially) and our transportation fuel's (hydrogen) waste product is water. If it wasn't for AI and computational maths you would likely be adding 100-200 years to the time line. We've got to make it out of this century without killing each other and falling into a dark age we won't get out of. The environment will recover and with nearly infinite energy even Ed's CO2 capture machines could be running for free although I have to say, help those previously energy poor people plant trees and rebuild their countries bio diversity and I bet you will see a rapid recovery globally. That's my belief anyway. Do I want to use LNG, not really, but our energy sequencing is totally wrong and it would take decades to train people to maintain SMR / Fusion systems even after we figure out how to build them cheaply enough to deploy globally (Edited multiple times due to typos and fat fingers).